Duncan Jones Quotes

TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

As a director, you're looking for ways to tell the story with the whole image and not primarily dialogue.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

I love picture books - with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

It's great when somebody is able to communicate an actual shot sequence to you and you know the world you're inhabiting with that. It's literally a haunting tune.

That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

A lot of shows are more script-driven, like a prose script. As an actor, you never see a storyboard.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."

In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy.

I miss directing. I see stories in images and music more so than in dialogue.

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

All of the good movies are based on how that story was told. And you cannot do it with a bad script, that's for sure, no matter who.